Doom busters: why some things aren't (quite) as bad as we think

"AI for Good is about building AI in the right way and using it for social good. We've learned there are good business reasons for building this technology safely – if you want people to adopt it and use it, they need to be able to trust it. We've done a lot of work around helping domestic abuse victims in South Africa, with a chatbot called rAInbow. It was designed to help people understand their legal rights. It can be quite overwhelming to take that first step to getting help and trusted information if you don't know where to begin. I think it's important to acknowledge the risks this technology brings, but there are also tremendous positive opportunities. I spend a lot of my time building AI that helps improve the justice system and helps people understand their legal rights. With this technology, we can produce legal drafts in minutes that used to take days. Courts can function better and faster, so people can get their hearing dates and we can make the system more efficient. What excites me is that the new generation of technologists don't have to have my background. I went to geek school after geek school, but the newest programming language is human language. This means we can bring in people from many different backgrounds to build it. If we do this right, we will be opening up the profile of people who work in technology and AI." Fanning the flames of a "culture war" might drive ratings, generate clicks and provide politicians with election fodder, but the idea there are ever-deepening divides in British social attitudes is misleading.